Posted on 05/27/2002 9:55:07 PM PDT by restornu
Watch all the talk of election or foreordination you are sounding like a calvinist:>)
What does the bold mean? What is a celestial body? But not resurected????
Now scottie I have a logical mind..I follow things out to their conclusion..So are you saying that Adam was Michael and he was an angel then a man?
Scottie I have look and everything I see indicates that to be a god one must have progressed through the steps..intelligence, spirit, man ,God..them possibly further progression...That still leaves me with my Holy Spirit question and the one on who are the angels.
As for the Calvinist comment: I think I told you before that Calvin with respect to election is probably very correct, his only error is a numerical one! (smile)
God elected all who come to this earth to be gathered as a hen gathers her chicks, yet we would not. We were all foreordained to victory in Christ against the Devil and his angels. Yes some will fall short. Some will fall over to the other side.
But the atonement of Christ is universal. For as in Adam all die, evenso in Christ shall all be made alive. Christ's sacrifice for sin was sufficient to wash away not only the sins of those dead in Christ, but for all the world. Christ died not only for sinners who love him, but also for those that hate him. God's grace is irresistable and universal, for all shall be redeemed by His blood, every knee shall bow, every knee shall confess that Jesus is the Christ. Your sins are forgiven by the atonement before you confess.
These are the messengers of the Lord, and are spoken of in the epistle to the Hebrews as “ministering spirits” (Heb. 1: 14). We learn from latter-day revelation that there are two classes of heavenly beings who minister for the Lord: those who are spirits and those who have bodies of flesh and bone. Spirits are those beings who either have not yet obtained a body of flesh and bone (unembodied), or who have once had a mortal body and have died, and are awaiting the resurrection (disembodied). Ordinarily the word angel means those ministering persons who have a body of flesh and bone, being either resurrected from the dead (reembodied), or else translated, as were Enoch, Elijah, etc. (D&C 129).
In Terry speak does this mean that angels are not yet born spirit children or the dead ? Would this be all the dead ..including those that have finished progressing or would it be the dead like me?
What is a archangel?
You lose Brownie points on that one!
Ps. 90: 2
2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
Ps. 93: 2
2 Thy throne is established of old: thou art from everlasting.
Deut. 33: 27
27 The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: ...
>> I would have to do a scripture hunt but I thought it was clear that we [men and angels] are different creations
Rev. 22: 9
8 And I John saw these things, and heard them. And when I had heard and seen, I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things.
9 Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: worship God.
>> why do some remain angels while others progress to human form?
I would put it this way: when in heaven, or visiting from heaven, we are angels, when living here in this fallen state, we are mortal men and women. We have fallen quite a ways, have we not?
Yes, very carefully, remembering that none of this is "LDS doctrine" or "what we LDS believe" unless we are showing it from the LDS Scriptures.
I Thought Jesus was a spirit child of the Father..as such how could he be eternal..or for that matter how could the Father be eternal if he was once a man like us?
How do you count eternity?
Your #68: How can one God be split into three separate Persons, but still be one God? That is the mystery ... the Trinity shows three distinct Gods in one Godhead.
Thanks for a most cordial post.
Yes, there are three distinct Gods, who are One, in One Godhead. That statement does not delineate the difference between us. The difference lies in how They are One. Jesus explains it:
John 17: 20-23
20 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;
21 That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
22 And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
23 I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.
(Notice that verse 23 has similar language to John 10:38, which you quoted.) Jesus prayed that all believers would be one as He and God the Father are One, a unity of heart, mind, thought, action, agreement, intent, purpose, and more, not a unity as in the number one.
There is clearly no intent here that all believers should be of one substance (Nicene Creed) with the Father and the Son, for that would make all believers "distinct Gods in one Godhead" (your phrase), or something like that. The Nicene Creed is not Scripture, anyway.
Here is some of what we find in the Bible on the subject. We will continue to disagree, I am sure, but perhaps you will see why we consider our understanding to be very definitely Scriptural, remembering that the fourth-century creeds are not Scripture:
We must avoid the temptation to view as figurative almost everything the Bible tells us about the nature of God. The pagan Greek philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and others was quite dominant in the culture of those fourth-century creed-writers. To the philosophers, God was One Eternal Mind, immaterial, having no substance other than the substance of thought, having no physical nature at all, for the Greeks saw that as corrupting and quite limiting. To Plato, the abstractions beyond the physical were the true realities. (To many Christians, this is how they interpret John 4:24 "God (is) (a) Spirit", which in my view really stretches the Greek work "pneuma", which means "breath" or "spirit".)
Augustine, schooled in Greek thought, insisted therefore that he would not "convert" to Christianity if he must believe in a corporeal God. The pull of Greek culture was just too strong.
We must not make the same mistake. We need to stick with the Scriptures, and let them teach us about the nature of God.
Jesus always was and always will be God. He was born into mortality and walked among us as a mortal man, yet He was still God. Using your words, "How could Jesus be Eternal, if He was once a man like us?" We all agree that He was once a man like us and we all agree that He is Eternal. He died on the Cross, yet He was still God. He rose again the third day, went through all these changes, and is still our Eternal God, from everlasting to everlasting, so why should His spirit birth affect His Godhood if none of these other tremendous changes did?
This is all reasoning from the Scriptures, but the Scriptures don't tell us about "spirit birth", other than we are all children of our Heavenly Father and Christ is the Firstborn "among many brethren". They also do not tell us about God the Father in anywhere near the detail they give about Jesus. Nor should they.
People love to extrapolate and speculate, but I think the best policy is to stick to our knitting. Strengthen our families, love our neighbor, tell others about Jesus, love God with all our might, keep the commandments, yield our hearts to God, and not devote all our attention to things far in the past and far in the future.
Sticking to the Scriptures means living what they teach and reining in our speculation where they stop and say no more.
The day will come when all things will be revealed, and we shall have all these answers to our hearts' content. In the meantime, let the Spirit bear witness to the truth, that we may stay close to God and not be led astray.
... and, from latter-day revelation, that we were all there as spirits before the foundation of the world when the plans for this earth were presented.
Believe it or not IF I wanted to ask a celestal sex question I would have been forthright and asked it:>) That was not my intent or my question now..
You wrote
This is all reasoning from the Scriptures, but the Scriptures don't tell us about "spirit birth", other than we are all children of our Heavenly Father and Christ is the Firstborn "among many brethren
Now I am not talking about Jesus being the firstborn of humans that have God for a human father..
I am asking how the LDS doctrine addresses ..the eternity of Jesus or the father with the teaching that the father was once a man and that Jesus was his spirit child before he became a man ?????
In Brigham's version, there are four generations of beings involved: starting at the top, we have Adam's Savior's Father, next, Adam's Savior (who was Adam's Elder Brother in a previous mortal life), Adam and Eve, who are already exalted beings as they arrive on the scene at the beginning of Genesis, and finally, all of the spirit children of Adam created between the point in time where Adam achieved his own exaltation and the creation of this Earth. In Brigham's version, none of the genealogy ever shifts around: Adam's mortal children are Adam's premortal children. In current LDS theology, Adam's mortal children are God the Father's spirit children. Brigham's version doesn't require us to juggle genealogical lines of descent.
====
So do you disagree with Brigham Young?? I though he was a Prophet and Seer......
I can only repeat that God the Father is Eternal, God the Son is Eternal, and Jesus being a man did not cancel out His Godhood. When the Scriptures only go so far back, they only go so far back.
Here is a verse that refers to our spirit birth without using the phrase:
Heb. 12: 9
9 Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?
Here is a passage from the D&C where Jesus states that being the Firstborn relates to things before the foundation of the world, and that we were there too:
D&C 93: 21
21 And now, verily I say unto you, I was in the beginning with the Father, and am the Firstborn;
22 And all those who are begotten through me are partakers of the glory of the same, and are the church of the Firstborn.
23 Ye were also in the beginning with the Father; that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth;
(I would click on the link and read a couple of times all that is highlighted in yellow, verses 1-40.)
Here is one verse from the passage in the Pearl of Great Price that contains the word "intelligences" (again, click on the link and read verses 21-28):
Abraham 3:22
22 Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones;
The way I read it, "intelligences" are "spirits" and vice versa. See if you agree. Some Latter-Day Saints try to assign a different meaning to the word "intelligences", as in your quote, but I think that is speculation. Nature abhors a vacuum, and people love to read between the lines and extrapolate beyond what is available. I try not to.
>> Believe it or not IF I wanted to ask a celestal sex question I would have been forthright and asked it:>) That was not my intent or my question now..
This is a good discussion -- you are not flamethrowing -- we will keep trying to understand as best we can.
I have run out of time, be back later.
On my way out the door, I will say this: This is not what Brigham Young taught. This is not "Brigham's version". Careful scholarship shows that. The doctrine of the Church, the Word of God, is in the LDS Scriptures, which, obviously, Brigham Young knew, loved, taught from, and was consistent with.
Back later.
First, while the Nicene creed was officially adopted in the 300s, this didn't mean that it was all of the sudden thought up then. As early as 180 AD, Theophilus of Antioch spoke of the the Trinity. He speaks of:
"the Trinity of God [the Father], His Word and His Wisdom ("Ad. Autol.", II, 15).
Around 260 AD one of the early church fathers wrote:
There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the Trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed, but had entered afterwards: therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit: and this same Trinity is immutable and unalterable forever (P. G., X, 986).
While the Trinity itself wasn't mentioned in that word, it was obvious when Jesus Christ said:
"go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (Matthew 28:18).
Philippians 2:10–11 reads: "[A]t the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." This is a reference to Isaiah 45:18–24: "I, Yahweh, speak the truth . . . I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn. . . . To me every knee shall bow, every tongue confess. ‘Only in Yahweh,’ it shall be said of me, ‘are righteousness and strength.’"
The prophecy of every knee bending and every tongue confessing to Jesus, resulting in the prophecy that they will "confess that Jesus Christ is Yahweh." The stress on Christ as God is also picked up by the early Church Fathers as I mentioned above.
Jesus himself declares that he is Yahweh ("I AM," in English translation). In John 8:58, when questioned about how he has special knowledge of Abraham, Jesus replies, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM." His audience understood exactly who he was claiming to be. "So they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple" (John 8:59).
With the personal name of God, Yahweh, being applied to both the Father and the Son, it is almost certainly applied to the Spirit (who proceeds from the Father and the Son), and thus to all three members of the Trinity.
The parallelism of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is appears throughout the New Testament, as well as in the writings of the earliest Christians, who clearly understood them in the sense that we do today—that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three divine persons who are one divine being (God).
It's hard for me to exactly understand what the sticking point is with the Mormon faith on the Holy Trinity, except that you believe that God in fact is a physical being and we believe He is purely a spiritual being, until He was born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit and became man.
John 1 seems to be pretty clear on the point that God and Jesus are one:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. (John 1:1-2)To me, this clearly says that Jesus, though he came after John the Baptist, came before him as well. Jesus is God of the OT; God the Father made him (Jesus) known through the gift of grace and the truth of the living Word.The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John testifies concerning him. He cries out, saying, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.' " From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only who is at the Father's side, has made him known. (John 1:14-18)
God bless.
You seem to be marking eternity to begin with what WE have as known time..and not before that.
I read what steve posted and did not understand one word of it to be honest...so I am flagging him here.
I do not get all this discussion on Adam pre Adams stuff. ( I am not that bright)Here is what I gather from you , Scott and independent reading..correct me where necessary
All of us were intelligence's ...we were made spirits by God the father and his wives..ALL of us were made spirits by God the Father including Jesus (now I am not clear on Michael/Adam). There was agreement to form this current system ...all the spirit children were to get human form so they too could progress...
But they needed to have certain trials to do so thus they need to have a human form as the Father himself did before became God.
A plan of salvation was worked out by Jesus in which he would come and die for the people that chose him..his brother lucifer also had a plan which was rejected..that led to he and 1/3 of the other spirit children being cast to earth..where they still work to steal the fathers glory
Now here are my questions..1) Am I correct that God the Father was once a man..that needed the same progression that all men need..so if you use the term "eternal " .you are either speaking of him from intelligence to God...or eternal as from the beginning of our recorded time..
2)Is Jesus a spirit child of God or was he a man exhaulted before he became part of the Godhead (same for lucifer). If Jesus is 1st a spirit child then 1st human child of the Father..he was only eternal in the sense of the progression from intelligence to godhead ( He can be called a God now as he has his resurrected body ...where others do not yet right?)
You do not mean that he was "eternally" in the same state he is now correct? But you speak to his pre existance???
I still am trying to grasp the Holy Ghost..but I keep getting hung up here.
Dr. Steve, I found the missing "trilogy" to your Adam-God Star Wars saga! (smile) I recommend it to you all. This article is very lengthy and very inciteful.
By reading it you can see how the Mormon scholarly community works to find clarity and harmony in all four of our Standard Works that we call Scripture and apply that harmony to every word uttered by the ordained Prophets and Apostles of God.
Cubicle Guy, and all others, please consider this article in the earnest expression of goodwill and charity with which I extend it. Mom, here is your challenge, many of the questions that you asked are answered in this article, your Calvinist perseverence will be fully exersized!(smile)
Given the subject matter, and opinions expressed on this thread, I trust you will understand that brevity on the subject is not justified and I pray that you will take the time to read it fully, ponder, and take the words in consideration to prayer.
"ADAM - GOD", Elden Watson, May 1998
Have a great weekend all! and "Beat L.A.!!"
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